At Loewe, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez Write Their Next Chapter

“We were horrified the night before the show,” Jack McCollough says, sitting on a white couch in Loewe’s Paris headquarters. “It felt like the first day of school or something.”

He’s nine months into his tenure as the Spanish house’s creative director—a job he shares with Lazaro Hernandez, his partner in work and life. Both men are confident, sociable, and remarkably skilled at articulating in words what it is they intend to communicate in silk and leather. McCollough is perhaps the wryer, more decadent bow to Hernandez’s emotive straight arrow. He found his own ways of coping with the stress of stepping back from Proenza Schouler, the brand that they created and ran for 23 years in New York, and moving to Paris to take on the oldest luxury fashion house in the LVMH portfolio.

“I took an Ambien!” he says.

McCollough and Hernandez have been going at full throttle for the past few months; they’ll be the first ones to admit it. “We’re working our butts off,” McCollough says. “Twelve- to fourteen-hour days.” I hear something jiggling in his palm. “Nicorette,” he says. “We’ve started smoking again.” The previous night, the pair had attended Loewe’s annual employee holiday party. The theme was “Under the Sea,” and they decided to go all out. McCollough grabs his phone to show their costumes: He’s in some kind of padded diving suit, and Hernandez is a scuba diver, complete with a snorkel.

Sleep, the gym, and the French tutor they keep telling themselves they’re going to hire will all have to wait—they’re finally in the role they’ve dreamed of for decades, with practically unlimited resources and free rein to follow their instincts and inclinations. “Loewe is all about pushing boundaries and expressing creativity and being a bit wild,” Hernandez says. “They want you to do things that are outside the norm. Sign me up! It’s like a playhouse.”

Their story begins in New York in 1998—the duo met at a club, aptly named Life. They were both students at Parsons, and ended up collaborating on a senior thesis collection (it included a black matte sequined camisole with a “negative space” Peter Pan collar), which was promptly snapped up by Barneys. Hernandez grew up in Miami and had spent some time in med school. McCollough was born in Japan, grew up in New Jersey, and had studied glassblowing. Who knows why it worked, but it worked: They launched Proenza Schouler, christened after their mothers’ maiden names, establishing themselves as the boy wonders of New York fashion. Rather than flaming out, they demonstrated mettle and savvy, collecting five Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) awards in the process. (Having handed the creative reins of Proenza Schouler over to Rachel Scott, founder of the esteemed label Diotima, in September 2025, they remain shareholders and board members of the company.)

By the time LVMH came calling, the question of whether they would get a shot at one of the biggest jobs in the industry had been hovering in the atmosphere for some time. Hernandez recalls, “We spoke to people at LVMH, and they said, ‘There’s something that might be coming up. Would you be interested in something new?’ ” Loewe was the appointment they’d been wishing and hoping for since it was announced that Jonathan Anderson would be leaving that house for Dior. Loewe was prestigious but not prissy, with an optimistic energy and an emphasis on cultural cross-pollination perfectly suited for a pair of deeply connected New Yorkers—their long-term gang of friends includes actors like Chloë Sevigny and artists like Dan Colen and Olympia Scarry. “What makes Jack and Lazaro’s work distinctive is that they are really influenced by art and make it a part of their practice,” says Scarry, pointing to their previous collaborations with Isa Genzken and Matthew Barney. “Their universe is a constellation of artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians.”

“We just feel so lucky to be at this specific house,” McCollough says. “We’re able to really push the boundaries and get super creative, whereas at some houses, you’re maybe a little more tied down to very specific aesthetic codes.” Hernandez chimes in: “Loewe’s about craft and creativity and a certain levity. It’s not a staid, stuffy brand.”

This is not to say that the transition from Brooklyn’s Fort Greene to the 7th arrondissement in Paris has been seamless. “We didn’t realize how embedded we were in New York, between owning a company and having two houses,” McCollough says. (In addition to their Brooklyn home, the couple owns an 18th-century clapboard farmhouse in the Berkshires.) At one point, Hernandez found himself lacking an email address, having used his Proenza Schouler address since 2002. Hassles aside, they’ve thrown themselves headlong into their latest assignment. “We’re loving it,” McCollough says. “We were itching for a new chapter. We’d been in New York since we were 18 years old, and we just really did that chapter and had some of the most cherished moments in our lives. But we were ready for something new. So when this came around, we didn’t question it.”

Forget the jitters and the zolpidem: Hernandez and McCollough are clearheaded about their mission at Loewe. They knew early on that they wanted to avoid the trap that they’d seen other American designers fall into “when you come to Paris, and all of a sudden you want to do a really French-looking thing, or couture,” Hernandez says. Rather than trying to hide who they were, or overcompensating in an intimidating environment, the pair decided to focus on three well-defined “pillars” that would form the foundation for their Loewe.

The first pillar is Spanishness. “It’s not the cliché tropes of flamenco or bullfighting,” Hernandez explains. “I come from a Latin family, so I understand—and Jack, by proxy, is now also Latino. There’s a passion to the culture, there’s a ferocity, there’s a sensuality. And that was an element that we thought was interesting for Loewe’s narrative: body and fruit and color and juiciness and sun.” Their debut ads for the brand radiated joy and sensuality: One featured a shamrock green bikini bottom wedged slightly unevenly between bronzed, goose-pimpled buttocks, while another depicted maraschino cherries as glossy as candied apples, their artfully skewed stems just waiting to be plucked.

And then there are the clothes—a scubalike gown with the kind of thin, vivid stripes you might see on a beach towel in Formentera, and a black minidress with a dramatic tiered cape in fuchsia and yellow, which was called in by Michelle Obama for one of her first appearances promoting her book The Look. (Okay, you might see a bullfighting reference here or there, but it’ll be a chic one.) McCollough recalls: “We were like, Is she sure she’s going to want to wear something so fashion? But she looked amazing.”

The second pillar is a particular kind of Americanness— a preppy, casual sensibility that sees the value in sending a sky blue hooded windbreaker down the runway, as Hernandez and McCollough did in their Loewe debut, to glowing reviews. “It’s part of our personal histories,” McCollough explains. “We’re two American kids from the East Coast, and there’s a way of dressing that we grew up with.” (Today he’s in a black button-down, while Hernandez wears a navy polo sweater.)

The duo decided to stage the aforementioned show in a spare white set to highlight a single piece of art that presided over the room like a sort of talisman: Ellsworth Kelly’s Yellow Panel With Red Curve (1989). The painting is—probably not coincidentally—a diptych, consisting of a sun-colored square attached to a three-sided red form that, it must be said, looks an awful lot like a matador’s cape. It’s one form; it’s two. It’s America; it’s Spain. It’s both and neither at the same time.

They had no idea how their take on Loewe would be received. “That first show was like threading a needle,” Hernandez says. “It couldn’t be too far away from where Loewe was, but it couldn’t be too close. No matter what we did, it felt like we were between a rock and a hard place.” When they were backstage after they had received a standing ovation, Hernandez bawled. “I feel like we worked so hard in New York for so many years, and people just wanted this for us.”

The third and probably most fraught pillar is craft, Loewe’s calling card since its 1846 inception as a shop specializing in small leather goods such as jewelry boxes, cigarette cases, and coin purses. Hernandez and McCollough intend to honor this heritage, but in their own way. “Our idea of craft is high-tech,” Hernandez says. “It’s sleek, industrial, and American—cars, surfboards, Wendell Castle’s chairs” (a trio of his Molar chairs is on display in their office). “All the West Coast minimalists,” McCollough says. “We’re obsessed with the Finish Fetish movement.” These references immediately bring to mind the molded leather dresses and jackets that anchored their show. “We’re playing with the idea of, how do you craft something to such a high level that you almost erase the craft?” Hernandez says, citing Donald Judd as an inspiration. “How do you ‘remove the hand’?”

Any creative director can come up with an enticing mood board. But the discipline that Hernandez and McCollough developed in more than two decades of keeping their own business alive sets them apart, and it’s evident in their pragmatic view of their role at Loewe. Yes, they’re having a candy-striped beach ball of a time. And, yes, they are palpably thrilled, after years of economizing and calling in favors, to indulge in LVMH’s supply chains and ateliers and big-time budgets. “We’re really pinching ourselves,” McCollough says.

Yet the paradoxical effect of all this freedom is that their focus has never been more laserlike. In the Proenza years, they might have skewed “super romantic” one season and pivoted toward something “more hardcore” the next. Now it’s the three pillars or bust. “People need to understand what we’re about,” McCollough says. “If you jump around too much, the brand message gets confusing. We’re trying to be as tight as possible while still keeping things new and unexpected.”

It’s no wonder they’re committed to establishing some stability. “In so many ways,” Hernandez says, “this has been the craziest year of our lives.”

Hair by Tsuki for Oribe at Streeters; makeup by Dan Duran for Dior Beauty at Frank Reps; manicure by Honey for Manucurist Paris at Exposure NY. Models: Agel Akol at Elite Models NY; Nyawurh Chuol at Next Management. Casting by Ashley Brokaw Casting.

Produced by DEHAVEN STUDIOS; producer: Brock De Haven; photo assistant: Aleck Venegas; digital technician: YC Dong; Retouching: October NY; Fashion assistant: Sierra Estrep; Hair assistant: Aya Yamashita; makeup assistant: Jennifer Gonzalez.